Hence Serengeti: If VMware can make Hadoop on VMs a legitimate option for companies that prefer to run applications on virtual resources for all the reasons VMware suggests, those companies get their way and VMware isn’t shut out of licensing revenue on potentially large Hadoop clusters.
Serengeti is just VMware’s latest attempt to secure a piece of the Hadoop market, though. It launched its Spring Hadoop project in February to help developers write big data applications using Spring, and in April it bought big data startup Cetas. On Tuesday, VMware rolled out a reference architecture (along with Hortonworks) for making Hadoop highly available by running the NameNode and JobTracker services on VMs.